Robert Cenedella

626 Gallery, Los Angeles

Art About Nothing. In his witty mixed media paintings, the artist uses the tools of the painter's craft, such as stretcher bars, brushes, and hardware, as well as found objects almost anything except paint on canvas. With these materials, the artist tweaks the viewer's expectations about the nature of painting, while putting the conceptual pretensions of contemporary art to the test.

comunicato stampa

Art About Nothing

626 Gallery is pleased to present an
exhibition of paintings and sculpture by New York artist Robert Cenedella.
Showing for the first time in California, the artist is best known for his
satirical works dealing with issues ranging from politics and sex, to the
Stock Exchange and the World Trade Center, to the Art World itself. The
artist will exhibit work from his provocative new series, ART about NOTHING.
In his witty mixed media paintings, Cenedella uses the tools of the
painter's craft, such as stretcher bars, brushes, and hardware, as well as
found objects Â­ almost anything except paint on canvas. With these
materials, the artist tweaks the viewerÂ¹s expectations about the nature of
painting, while putting the conceptual pretensions of contemporary art to
the test.

The exhibition will have approximately twenty-five paintings and several
sculptures from the ART about NOTHING series, with an x-ray look at a
painting's skeleton Â­ both its physical support and the unspoken conventions
behind the art. The viewer literally sees paintings stripped bare to reveal
both nothingness and the love of art itself, expressed through formal
invention, unexpected combinations, and the continual conversation between
artist and object. Rather than a dry polemic, this work is at once playful
and poetic, and infused with Cenedella's unique pop sensibility. The
artist's use of clamps, chains, and turnbuckles speaks directly of the labor
and tension that often are disguised in a completed work of art. CenedellaÂ¹s
ART about NOTHING celebrates the endless joys and struggles of making
something out of nothing.

The exhibition also includes ten works from his recent series, The Easel
Painting Revival, which alludes to the parade of styles in art over the past
fifty years. William Zimmer, contributing critic to The New York Times,
writes, "This contentious atmosphere around abstract expressionism and its
aftermath, fueled by true believers and detractors, is the subject of Robert
Cenedella's new and subtly dramatic installation." On display, as well, will
be a small selection of oil paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, featuring
Cenedella's long interest in satirical comment upon societyÂ¹s foibles. The
artist's colorful and detailed canvases have skewered American culture's
materialism, racism, and militarism, along with its love of sports,
spectacle, and excess.

In 2003, Cenedella was honored by the first survey of political art
presented at The Nation in New York. Victor Navasky, the magazineÂ¹s editor,
remarked, "If Cenedella were merely a satirist with a palette, it would be
easy to locate him as the most recent in a long line of protest artists and
simply proceed that he is giving protest art a good name. In many ways,
Cenedella chooses to play the role of Court Jester, but since he does so
with such astonishing color and form and since his wit is strangely
passionate, he complicates not only our ability to classify his work, but to
think about art itself."

In ART about NOTHING, Cenedella pursues a path he has followed for over
forty years, creating a series of "contra mundem" gestures undertaken in the
spirit of activist conceptual art. In 1965, as a young artist, Cenedella
issued the Yes Art manifesto, a satirical commentary on Pop Art. In the
mid-1980s, the painter became embroiled in controversy when a large painting
of Santa Claus being crucified was censored from an exhibition. (This
painting will be shown in the current exhibition.) In 1994, in a project
termed "conceptual art" by art dealer Leo Castelli, Cenedella sold stocks in
an individual painting, 2001 - A Stock Odyssey, conceived of as a large,
single junk bond. Cenedella's career has been punctuated by conceptual
projects that comment on the art world and the world art lives in.

Robert Cenedella's work is in many private and corporate collections, and
has been featured in three Absolut Vodka ads. On March 11, 2004, Cenedella
unveiled "The Easel Painting Revival" at Le Cirque 2000. In this world
famous New York restaurant is also permanently installed his painting, Le
Cirque: The First Generation, a panoramic group portrait of more than one
hundred famous patrons, including Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Bill Cosby, Tony
Randall, Cy Coleman, and Barbara Walters, enjoying a repast at the original
Le Cirque restaurant in the Mayfair Hotel. This spring, Robert Cenedella had
a solo exhibition at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and lecture:
"WHAT isn't ART." He has also shown his work at the Galerie Am
Scheunenviertel in Berlin, Germany, at Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, and at
The Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

Cenedella received his education at the High School of Music and Art in New
York, and The Art Students League of New York, where he studied under the
late German satirical painter George Grosz in the late fifties. In 1988, he
inherited the George Grosz chair at the Art Students League, where he has
since taught life drawing and painting.

Cenedella's art and life are the subject of a forthcoming book, The American
Artist as Satirist, by M. Kay Flavell and documentary film, The Disclaimer,
directed by Gary Halvorson, who has directed televison episodes of Friends,
Everybody Loves Raymond, and Joey, as well as Metropolitan Opera productions
broadcast for PBS. Robert Cenedella lives and works in New York.